


Of space and its quietness

by Jay Starbeing (thetulpaspet)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Hanahaki AU sort of, I forgot where I was going with it but I'll figure it out :D, Langst, Mute!Lance, technically already have a third started but lets see when that will happen, woo wrote that second chapter, working in Hogsmeade sucks a little
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-08
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2018-10-16 05:30:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,639
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10564593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thetulpaspet/pseuds/Jay%20Starbeing
Summary: Lance discovers just how useless the team feels he is.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hiya~ This came from a langst post on tumblr that I saw. The idea stuck around in my head and I had to type something up soooo, here ya go. Hope its good. Its unedited and unbetaed. Whoops.
> 
> Edit (4/19/17): Oh man, this blew up so badly. I wasn't expecting it to get the popularity it got. Thanks for all the comments you guys left <3\. More parts are in definitely in the works, so hold onto your butts. There's more Langst-bergs up ahead but there's a happy ending somewhere. :3c~

It had been mostly an accident, something that couldn’t have been avoided even if they had tried. It had started off as a simple peace mission, go to so and so planet and make alliances with the locals, get supplies, yada yada. To Lance, it was the same old schtick. They’d been at this for at least two years now, had many quite a few alliances and had settled who knows how many wars. And had gotten into who knows how many fights.

Lance was proud to say that none of the fights were his fault. Of course, no one really cared. Okay, maybe a few were his fault, but those were just honest mistakes. Things he couldn’t avoid. Like this one. It hadn’t been started by him. They’d been intending to make peace but, once on the planet and talking with their leaders, they’d discovered that they weren’t quite on the side of good. They should’ve figured that out with all the purple they kept seeing everywhere, but they’d been busy talking. Well, Lance had had his suspicions, but when did they ever take him seriously.

Now, they found themselves in a fire fight, away from their Lions and sort of each other. Shiro was on his own, Pidge was with Hunk, and here he was with Keith, of all people. They had a tentative friendship going on, for now, and so Lance had dove to save Keith, pushing him out of the way of whatever magical burst had been thrown at Keith. Instead, Lance was grazed by it, shuddering and collapsing. The others took the rest of their attackers out as Lance lay on the ground, sweating and shuddering and coughing and looking terrible.

They got him back to the castle ship and checked out. Coran diagnosed him as having a fever and some disease or something or other that he didn’t quite catch the name because it was mostly in Altean. Suffice it to say, his vocal cords were damaged by the disease/magic/whatever it was but, because of how it worked, they couldn’t heal Lance right away. There was an incubation phase of something like two weeks that they would have to wait through. In the mean time, Lance would be unable to talk. Coran reassured him that everything would be fine, that he could just communicate via his writing tablet with everyone and that two weeks would pass by quickly.

The two week period started off alright, Lance supposed. It didn’t take much to get the teams attention, though they kept forgetting that he couldn’t talk. Keith would get snappy at him. Hunk would ramble on and on and on and then get mad when he couldn’t comment on his cooking, which he always did. During training, Shiro would call for everyone to make sure they were alright, as if they were out in the field and had been separated, and would also get mad when he couldn’t answer. Pidge would do the same thing, the few times he tried hanging out with her. They would also joke about how much quieter it was now that he couldn’t talk, how much they could hear their own thoughts now. It hurt to hear, but Lance took it in stride. That’s just what happened around him. He was still their team mate, he still had a job to do. When it got to be too much, he’d just go curl up in Blue’s cockpit, comforted by the purring only he could hear. Blue didn’t care if he couldn’t talk. She didn’t need him to speak to hear what he was saying.

It got worse the longer the week went on. They continued getting mad when he didn’t answer back. And then, one of his fears happened. He had gone to get Pidge for training and, when she didn’t hear him, he’d hesitantly touched her shoulder, intending to shake her gently. It was barely a touch at all, but she’d jumped and snapped at him. Everyone knew by now that Pidge had a problem with being touched, and she reminded him, rather loudly, of that fact. After that, he avoided touching anyone to get their attention. He relied on waving his hands and arms around, which never really worked 99 percent of the time. Usually he just ended up getting ignored.

So he stopped trying as much to get their attention. They wouldn’t get mad if he got the work done, so he strived to do better, shoot better, fly better. One week slowly turned into two, and everyone got over him not talking to them, stopped asking his opinion on things. He ate quietly, trained quietly, did his job quietly. If they noticed how hard he worked during training sessions, they never said so. He was sure they never noticed his late nights spent in the training hall, or the times he’d sneak out in Blue to practice flying.

Two weeks turned into three pretty quickly. And then into four. And five. A month later found Lance still unable to speak, but by then, he didn’t care. The team didn’t care if he spoke at all, he noticed, so he didn’t remind them about the surgery or whatever they were supposed to do. It didn’t matter anyways. All he ever did was train or read. Blue became his only companion, her purrs the only thing that rocked him to sleep at night after long, painful training sessions or on nights when he couldn’t sleep at all, the tears too much to handle. No one ever noticed anything, and Lance preferred it that way.

Why be a bother to the team?


	2. Shiro's Disappearance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A little bit on what Lance has been up to, his thoughts on Shiro disappearing, and maybe Leader Lance?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I'm so sorry I took so damn long with this. I've had it typed up on my laptop for the longest time and only now figured I'd post what I have as the second chapter. Life has been....difficult. I'm working again and, while I love it, its been hell on my sleep schedule. I hope this lives up to what everyone thinks. Its not betaread either, so any mistakes are mine.)

Lance had lost count of how long it had been since he'd talked last. He'd had other things to worry about. Like storming Zarkon's main castle and actually fighting him. Not being able to talk had not helped him at all, not with the sheer number of enemies, but they'd somehow managed. Had somehow managed to take down Emperor fucking Zarkon. And yet, it didn't feel good. Because then Shiro was gone and everything was chaos.

Keith was very determined to find Shiro again. Despite Coran’s warnings, he went out to the battlefield, or what was left of it, and searched almost daily. It was that, or training on his own. He refused to train with the others, which Lance got. He had started to do the same thing. He wanted to find Shiro as soon as he could but no one knew where to look. How could they know? The last place they'd seen him was in his Lion before and during the battle. He’d been telling them what to do, as a proper leader, before he’d disappeared. So they took care of Black for him, debating between themselves about where he could be, or where he had gone. Except for Lance. HE stuck to himself, listening in on the conversations from the hallway or whenever he happened to be passing the group. He had his own theories, of course, but no one seemed to care what he thought.

They, of course, continued trying to make peace. The others were sent on peace keeping missions to different planets, trying to recruit people to join their cause. Lance stuck to fighting missions, Allura recognizing his growing talent with them. Even alone, he always managed to accomplish his mission. Not that he was ever satisfied. The team continued joking about him flirting with the other aliens, with the plants, and even with the Lions themselves. He’d become more serious than them about taking care of the Lions, in truth. He made sure to clean the outside of the Lions after every battle, tending to every scratch and ding they got in the missions. He’d even repainted them, making them look nicer than before. It was almost therapeutic. It made him forget, for a little bit, that his team was leaving him behind, was joking about him in ways he didn’t like. It was tiring work, though, and often lasted into the dead of “night.” Which was fine by him. The team left him alone to his work and, by the time he was done, he was tired enough that he passed out after his nightly shower.

Of course, his team did “check” in on him sometimes. They’d ask how he was doing, let him barely answer before going off. They’d never do that with Shiro around. Shiro kept the group together, made them care about each other in ways they wouldn’t normally. But without him, they’d split. He’d been left behind like the peace of trash he always thought he was. But he was beyond caring at this point, and continued on his own path. He started going out to explore planets and learn about the native cultures that they saved. They seemed…happy to see him, to his surprise, and, unbeknownst to him, he became something of a figure head for Voltron, even though he couldn’t talk. Most places they or the Blade saved now expected Lance to come and almost always had parties for him, something the others never showed up to. Most planets just thought he was the leader anyways, because of course the leader would show up to see how they were doing, even if he wasn’t the black Paladin.

Even then, life for Lance got worse. Sure, he was still completing his missions, but he was starting to get short of breath a lot. And throwing up these awful tasting flowers of all colors. Well, three colors, and sometimes a fourth. He tried to ignore the colors the flower petals bore, but his heart hurt. Why? Why the colors of his team? He ignored it to the best of his abilities, but it caught up with him sooner than he wanted.


End file.
